Planet Ergo

It's been a very busy past two weeks and I haven't had much time to show my face on IRC or respond to email. I've participated in or executed some interesting activities though, so please allow me to share those with you.

On Monday, almost two weeks ago, I visited Bacula Systems headquarters in Switzerland, to get a 1-on-1 training from Kern Sibbald -the original author of Bacula backup & recovery software-, in order to become a certified Bacula Systems Trainer. A quick walk-through the slides along with some insight on what Kern thought were the most important highlights to mention and/or explain during the training, a review of the exercises and one day later, you have sufficient additional information apart from the course material itself.

The next day, Eric Schirardin introduced me to how the Bacula Systems course classroom setup was to be configured, so that all the exercises could be performed without the course attendees having to go through the motions that in fact would have had little to do with Bacula itself.

Since my flight back to the Netherlands was leaving early that evening, and I had an important Kolab Systems conference call in between, I had to hurry and catch a train to the airport, find myself a nice, quiet corner somewhere, a wifi connection and call in. I made it, but that morning I had no idea how smoothly we would go through the motions to get me to be able to set up the classroom and at what time we'd be done exactly. Let's just say I had too little time to get any lunch before I caught a train just in time for me to arrive at the airport and not have any of the ambient train noises while sitting in a conference call. Then again, I don't usually eat during lunch anyways ;-)

The next day (Thursday last week), I was going to travel to Osnabrueck for a visit to a valued partner on behalf of Kolab Systems; a three-hour train-ride from Utrecht. In order to arrive at a reasonable time, I had to get up at around 6 in the morning, not something I'm very much used to, nor a fan of ;-) Either way though, the visit was planned for Thursday as well as Friday, and it was definitely worth the travel! I was staying with Christoph Wickert -you know him from his contributions to the Fedora Project and various upstream projects- in Munster throughout my stay in Germany.

On Saturday, I was on my way back home again. Since the Bacula Systems Administration Course was to start on Tuesday, and Monday was allocated to preparing the classroom (and testing the setup), most of my weekend was spent at going through the slides and exercises and preparing my story. Luckily, I was still very familiar with the course as I had recently participated in the course myself, so I could afford to visit a friend's birthday party as well.

On Monday, it turned out that VirtualBox (used to create a second backup client for the Bacula Systems Administration Course), installed on a 64-bit laptop without hardware virtualization acceleration capabilities cannot run a 64-bit guest, so I quickly installed a 32-bit guest and configured it, which actually took the majority of the single day that I had available.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, at Amaziq Source in Amsterdam, I ran the Bacula Systems Administration I Course (there's a part II coming up as well, with more advanced topics) with 6 participants from 4 countries, and I'd like to think that it was very successful. At least Bacula Systems (through their senior engineer Arno Lehmann) thought so, because I passed the test running the course according to their quality standards, and so now I'm a proud Bacula Systems Certified Trainer ;-)